Whats next for Yahoo?
Over the last 5 years Yahoo has been on the downfall and left in the shadow of market leaders Google. Every Search Engine Optimisation enquiry we receive is to appear in Google, rarely Yahoo. In this article we will look over Yahoo raise and fall and why now it only own 19% of the market they innovated.
Yahoo is widely considered the original big time search engine and reasoning behind what is now the search engine phenomenon. They originally launched in 1994 on a sub domain of the founders (Jerry Yang and David Filo) University website, was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo. In least than one year Yahoo (was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo) had a million hits under their belts and the founders realised the potential behind their site. They later released on its new domain www.yahoo.com and surfed the Internet boom during the late 90’s early 00’s. During that time Yahoo released a range of Internet services including Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Games, GEO Sites and Yahoo Groups.
They remain pretty much unrivaled apart from some minor competition from sites like Lycos and Excite. However, it wasn’t until Google’s quick growth that Yahoo faced serious competition. In 2007 it was reported that Yahoo now only own 19% of the market share, compared to Google’s massive 53%. It is still the second biggest search engine with MSN falling behind with a 12% share. However with such fierce competition from Google does Yahoo still stand a chance?
As of today there have been numerous of failed acquisition attempt by Microsoft, ranging from 2005 till present the most recent being the start of this year, all of which have been unsuccessful. Now the future of Yahoo is hanging in the balance with suggestions of a merger with Google. In my opinion the days of Yahoo being a market leader are over and the chance of a possible merger with Google or MSN is the only solution left for the previous giants.
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